Alvin Toffler
Alvin Toffler
Alvin Tofflerwas an American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing modern technologies, including the digital revolution and the communication revolution, with emphasis on their effects on cultures worldwide...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth4 October 1928
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
people vision experts
We need people who can see straight ahead and deep into the problems. Those are the experts. But we also need peripheral vision and experts are generally not very good at providing peripheral vision.
expression political economic
Freedom of expression is no longer a political nicety, but a precondition for economic competitiveness.
individual shock avert
To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before.
running emotional data
Society needs people who...know how to be compassionate and honest...Societ y needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they're emotional, they're affectional. You can't run the society on data and computers alone.
change men overwhelmed
Man has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock.
change limits humans
There are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb.
fiction sovereign shock
Science fiction is the sovereign prophylactic against future shock.
technology people favelas
We will only keep people from fleeing the countryside into urban favelas, villas miseries, shantytowns and squatter villages when the productivity gap is closed between what brute labor on the soil can accomplish and what advanced technology makes possible today - and will make possible tomorrow.
waking hours
I work virtually every waking hour.
writing editors errors
Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.
ideas assassins matter
Idea-assassins rush forward to kill any new suggestion on the grounds of its impracticality, while defending whatever now exists as practical, no matter how absurd.
loneliness being-alone giving
Any decent society must generate a feeling of community. Community offsets loneliness. It gives people a vitally necessary sense of belonging. Yet today the institutions on which community depends are crumbling in all the techno-societies. The result is a spreading plague of loneliness.
mind library libraries-and-reading
A library is a hospital for the mind.” - Anonymous
kings cutting knights
Human beings were held accountable long before there were corporate bureaucracies. If the knight didn't deliver, the king cut off his head.